


like real people do

by dripping_moonlight



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Warriors
Genre: Depression, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:07:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dripping_moonlight/pseuds/dripping_moonlight
Summary: The Sorceress had taken his darkness, shaped it in his image but one cannot be whole without it.Link is depressed. That's it.
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Kudos: 3





	like real people do

In the days and weeks following the Battle of the Valley of Seers, no one said a thing. Not Zelda, not Impa, not even Lana. Link suspected Proxi had something to do with the fleeting stares and mortuary laughter, but he did not bring it up. It was for the better, anyway. Whether it was Proxi or not, he was thankful. He'd never sent so many prayers before. 

But now it'd been months and the paralysing non-judgement had long faded into the background. They'd had battles after that, after all. Ganon had to be sealed then the portals to the Era of the Great Sea. It was simply impractical to maintain the facade. 

So one day-- one peaceful breezy day-- Impa, in all her commanding glory, finally broke that barrier. It came not in the form of words (Impa had never been one to coddle anyone) but in under-eye concealer. It was the perfect shade and weight. And it broke him. 

He marched into Her Majesty's tent, intent on apologizing for his less than seemly behaviour but all the escaped his lips were pleas of pardon. He stood there, chest shaken with bent composure, as her quick-silver eyes tried and tried again to strategize through his tears but failed, for this was the one aspect they had been trained in: remorse. 

The facet of their self which comes from the divine had never been a secret to anyone, but it was strange nonetheless to see her tap into the millennia of knowledge that she had been ~~blessed~~ ~~cursed~~ born with, sifting through the memories of child rulers and knight students until she found the big sister he needed now. 

When her delicate hand, calloused from the sword she held and armor she polished, came upon his cheek his body, so quick to escape the touch of recently rotten femininity, could no longer resist the pull of his soul (so in tune to her's, so damaged) towards the comfort. 

"Tell me what it is, Link." Not Hero. Not Captain. Not because he wasn't, but because not a million titles could encompass the pain of humanity that his birth name could. 

Thus, trusting her, he did. She'd known about the darkness which the sorceresses extracted from him, ripe for her picking from the heady overconfidence the sword of evil's bane had given him. The fact he wasn't all golden did not faze her (she, too, bled red). But she had, incorrectly, thought the Shades had left him an empty shell of his whole self. And some days they had. Some days he was not. Some days he was trapped between layers of prophecy, so intertwined with his being it was impossible to begin to separate the two. Some days he simply existed, feeding the body which now felt so foreign to him and following the schedules that had been set out for him. It was easy to exist this way. Some days he'd even bother with inhabiting his own body to tell jokes and wrestle about with young recruits. Those days he savored, locking them deep within the vaults of his mind so that the hungry thief so burdened by it's hollow existence could not so easily consume him. 

But there were other days where he would not float through a haze of bare minimums but where he was bogged down heavy with chains of sorrow. Those days he was not empty of his darkness but full of it, stuffed to every cavity and artery so that he felt he might explode and still he took on more. Those days it was better to join the shadows in the corners tucked away from candlelight. He felt as if he could swallow the sun with his darkness and not reflect a single ray. Those days he wished he could turn back time, beg the goddess who had cursed him to forget him in her grand plan; he wished to lay in the earth and be consumed by the creatures and spores that had already turned his fallen comrades into compost. 

Everything was harder on heavy days. His ribs turned to living vines and threatened to pulp his lungs. His stomach became a rock sunk deep into the bed of a lake, unwilling to accept outside substance choosing instead to give itself up to the gnawing fish as sacrifice. His legs filled with the liquid fires of Death Mountain, sinking into the ground below, leaving destruction in it's wake. His arms became poisonous, begged for attention from the sharpened blades that replaced his fingernails. His eyes were seen shut with iron wire, his mouth with copper. His ears filled with cotton and wax and the bees that made it, so loud and muffled it was impossible to think. It was only possible to feel. But he could only feel what the Shade had made of him. 

Her Majesty, in all her grace, could do nothing about the intoxicating weight that attempted to crush what the sorceress had not. But, he had to admit, her ears now so tainted with the knowledge, had already cut away at his Shade's grip.

"What should we do?" she asked, long after the sun had been so gently tucked in behind the horizon by his sister moon, all seeing in her secrecy. The question required too big an answer that his sleeping brain could not provide. She could wait, though, at least until the sun awoke and seared the shadows out of him and replaced them with it's weaker, more manageable brother, lacking. 


End file.
